Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="CapnZapp" data-source="post: 8107841" data-attributes="member: 12731">Pathfinder 2 is absolutely everything but "consistent with few exceptions". The game in general is shock full of weird little special rules, conditions, and limitations. Very little of it feels earned, or contributive to the play experience.The game screams for a general mechanism to grease the wheels, one that empowers the gamesmaster to allow slight deviations from what the framework lets you do.The core three-action mechanism can cause weird artifacts, such as when you're 30 feet from a door. Escaping through that door? That's a hard no to that. You can't - you move 25 feet, then five more feet, then Interact to open the door... and you're out of actions. But could the GM simply... let you? Perhaps ask for a DC 15 Acrobatics check to make you feel less... emasculated? That's a hard no to that. There are dozens of feats that would get instantly invalidated if the GM just let the heroes act... heroically, like in every other edition of D&D. Quick Jump, Combat Climber, ... just look at these feats and think about what they say about the game.Let me tell y'all what they're saying: They're saying "You need me not to suck weirdly". Even a level 20 character is completely inflexibly restricted and locked-down until she takes a specific feat. Or ten.Instead of looking at their prototype three-action framework and going "we need to let the GM allow skill checks to transcend and ignore the weird artefacts that can happen" Paizo instead said "let's double down on the hard no's by inventing a feat for everything we can identify as something to lock down!" "Gating things behind feats must be good, right, since it means more options! Right? Right?"When I reflect upon 4E's failure and 5E's success, I draw the exact opposite conclusion about how to design my game as did Paizo. They went ahead and doubled down on exactly the things 4E wallowed in, and that 5E eschews!---Nearly every feat and item brings some kind of tiny puny and frankly unnecessary special condition or limitation that increases the rules burden on the player and GM.Far too many feats work the "same, same but different" way than a feat you'd think would do the same thing. It does, just with niggly little differences.Everyday actions like climb, jump, crawl are weirdly locked down. Related feats come across not as making you awesome. Instead they make you not actively suck.Too many magic items work like in 4th edition in that they're too much of a hassle to be worth the bother. Getting a +1 or +2 bonus once every blue moon on a specific check just isn't worth remembering.I could probably present a hundred different examples proving this beyond the slightest doubt, but I fear it would mean going down a rabbit hole that gives actual mental damage, so I shan't.To illustrate this point, let me quote myself from all the way back to page two of this discussion (thanks whoever just gave this post a like!)</blockquote>

Verification